Disproportionate Discipline - Pilnik

I have become increasingly aware of disciplinary disparities by gender in my classroom. My classroom uses a leveled behavior system (an ascending/descending combo -- i.e., one can move one's clip up from white to green or down from white to red). One consequence of landing on "red" is school detention and sitting in during recess. In the time I have been in school, only once has a female student been held back for detention or recess. Overwhelmingly, it is the same four to six male students who stayed in and who received the most in-class targeting for their behavior.

My classroom (and the whole school) subscribes to a behavior management system whose goal it is to be explicit with school behavior expectations. While teachers and staff alike take great pains to be explicit in conveying those expectations, and offer reward and punishment for adherence/non-adherence, there are still many students who seem simply not to be taking any of it in.

Students who "act up" are meted out punishment up to a week later (for instances when detention is earned at the end of the week, after the set detention-serving day) and students who follow the noise and movement rules receive school currency. The latter set of students are buying into the school's social contract -- in Pedro Noguera's words, "In exchange for an education, students are expected to obey the rules and norms operative within school and to comply with the authority of the adults in charge" (Noguera, "What Discipline is For: Connecting Students to the Benefits of Learning").

However, as Noguera points out in his essay,

This arrangement tends to be least effective for students who do not receive the benefits promised by the social contract. Students who are behind academically...or have come to regard school as a boring, compulsory chore are more likely to disrupt classrooms and defy authority.

Indeed, twice already this week, I have heard exclamations of "I hate school!" and "School is so boring. Why do I have to do this?" Not surprisingly, these sentiments came from the boys who are most frequently held in at recess or detention.

Problematic is the idea that these students have inherent deficits: Often, these students will be labeled "troublemakers". In the same essay, Noguera suggests that as students internalize this label, they embrace the stigma, whereupon "punishment reinforces undesirable behavior rather than serving as an effective deterrent". He suggests later, as a possible solution, that:

By relying upon alternative discipline strategies rooted in ethics and a determination to reconnect students to learning, schools can reduce the likelihood that the neediest and most disengaged students, who are frequently children of color, will be targeted for repeated punishment.

He references aptly psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg and his research in moral development in children, stating that Kohlberg "argued that teaching students to obey rules in order to avoid punishment was far less effective than helping students to develop the ability to make reasoned ethical judgments about their behaviour" (Ibid.)

Alfie Kohn, author and lecturer on education and human behavior, suggests that teachers look internally for the root of the behavior "problem" in their classrooms: "Maybe when there's a problem, we should focus not only on the child who doesn't do what he's asked, but also on what he's being  asked to do (and how reasonable it is)" (Kohn, Discipline Is The Problem -- Not The Solution).
Is the unconditional obedience the school stresses in its school pledge ("I promise to do my duty to __ School, to obey its rules...") serving all students well? Does it work toward helping students develop complex ideas about ethics?
Kohn does not seem to think so. He argues that "it's...crucial that we overcome a preoccupation with getting compliance and instead involve students in devising and justifying ethical principles" (Idem, Beyond Discipline).

My last niggling confusion lies in reconciling this grander goal with what may be unrealistic expectations of students, developmentally. While Kohlberg does suggest that "helping students to develop the ability to make reasoned ethical judgments" is more useful than stressing compliance, I am curious about his stance on how a child's level of moral development comes into play during a classroom discussion about ethical principles. My second-grade students are all 8 years old and younger; their level of moral development is either at the pre-conventional or conventional stage. Further, because moral development presumably progresses in stages, students cannot skip any stage to reach the post-conventional stage, which seems to be required to discuss social contracts in any empowering way.

Budd Churchward (author on topics of child discipline) brings up what seems to me a legitimate concern, namely "that in a society that expects math, reading, and other subject's programs to be different for each student or each grade level, the discipline programs are the same at each level" (http://eqi.org/kohlberg.htm). Why should we expect teachers to differentiate in academic subjects, but hold students to identical expectations (in the name of "fairness") when they may be at developmentally different levels?

The topic of school discipline (and its biases and consequences) is a heady and complex one. There seems to be no panacea, no prescriptive approach to classroom management that avoids the pitfalls of an ill-structured discipline program. Instead, it appears that the only remedy for my concerns about the disaffected students in my classroom is to cultivate in myself (and, hopefully, in my future classroom) a mindfulness about the issue and my role in helping or harming my students through discipline.